Video: Dan Rather explains it all to you

posted at 9:14 am on September 21, 2007 by Allahpundit

As promised, from last night’s Larry King. On this lawsuit may depend the future of independent journalism, he suggests, a neat trick for a guy who spent 44 years at the desk for the most famous corporate news outfit in America. It’s not that he passed off garbage documents as authentic — no one’s proved that they’re garbage, Mr. Independent falsely reminds us — it’s that his mindless corporate masters wanted to “appeal to the Bush White House,” in King’s words, by getting rid of him. Why they would want to do that isn’t explained but I can’t wait for the trial to find out. Blame the company for his on-air apology during the scandal too: he says he takes responsibility for it but then dismisses it as something he didn’t believe in and didn’t want to do but did anyway to show he was a team player at CBS. That darned corporation again. Always making it hard for those who are “big on personal responsibility.”

If he wants to see independent journalism at work, wait until one of CBS’s corporate drone lawyers gets him on the stand and hands him Charles Johnson’s memo overlay as Exhibit 1. What a goof it’ll be to see points first made and supported by bloggers being used by CBS against Dan Rather. I leave you with the words of his old pal, the fair and balanced Mary Mapes, showing off the skills that paid CBS’s bills for the benefit of the one blog audience which, more than any other, really appreciates people like her and Document Dan.

In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.

What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview…

Instantly, the far right blogosphere bully boys pronounced themselves experts on document analysis, and began attacking the form and font in the memos. They screamed objections that ultimately proved to have no basis in fact. But they captured the argument. They dominated the discussion by churning out gigabytes of mind-numbing internet dissertations about the typeface in the memos, focusing on the curl at the end of the “a,” the dip on the top of the “t,” the spacing, the superscript, which typewriters were used in the military in 1972.

Follow the link and read at least the end so that you’ll appreciate how Bishop Rather helped “guide the country” through its crises from his perch in the sacred, magical newsroom.

Independent journalism is important to our way of life and our government.

Unless your name is Johnson. Anyone with that name or “Chuck” is right out. And documents created in 2004 at a Kinko’s are accurate representations of what a dead guy thought and may have written at the time. It’s not fake, it follows our narrative and our beliefs.

Does he have no idea how much DAMAGE he has done to the principal of “independent journalism”? He has diluted the meaning of “journalistic integrity”. Even now, by asserting that nobody has proven the documents to be frauds (rather than that they HAVE proven them to be genuine) he stands fact-checking on its head.

I said it on yesterday’s thread (in a different form), and I’ll say it again.

Just for once I would like this question posed to Dan Rather or Mary Mapes: when an investigative reporter presents a document potentially damaging to a public figure (much less potentially altering a presidential election), with whom should the burden of proof lie: with the journalist to prove that it is authentic, or with the public to prove that it is fraudulent?

And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the throbing memo. It increased my fury as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right reality, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed proved to be disruptive to their worldview complete bullsh*t being foisted on the unsuspecting senior citizens who watch 60 minutes.

Oh, no you don’t. You want to go, Dan? Then let’s go. It’s on, you f*cking moron.

I, for one, will be ringside, savoring every last moment, while this egomaniacal retard rinses away any sense of journalistic integrity that either he, himself, or CBS ever claimed to have. They will all of them be fully exposed, and we will, all of us, be fully vindicated.

/Tinfoil Hat On
But what if this was all part of the plan? What if CBS intenionally does a half assed job on the stand. Other than a couple million dollars, what do they have to lose, credibility? They lost that a long time ago. By losing the case on purpose, they can restore the narrative. Moreso, they can even bring in the VWRC theory that they were cowed by “The Administration” to shove Dan under the bus. CBS doesn’t have to prove this, they just have to not defend against it. Its so simple its Rovain.
/Tinfoil Hat Off

Curse you Allah for making me read the HuffPo and those ridiculous comments!

Now I need a gallon of brain bleach.

CrimsonFisted on September 21, 2007 at 9:48 AM

I’ll go halvesies with you on the brain bleach. It is truly stunning to me that so many people think like that and still manage to type and (mostly) spell. The few rational people who showed up were immediately accused of being Rush Limbaugh sycophants.

Rather is a partisan psychopath. I see him committing suicide once he realizes he can’t get back a shred of his dignity back. Sorry, but his warped ego just won’t let him to continue to live. He will be dead by his own hand by next summer I’ll bet.

The funny thing about all is that, Rather’s whining aside, the fakes were so blatant and easily detected that it didn’t take “experts on document analysis” to detect them at all.

The nail in the coffin wasn’t even a verbal argument, it was a simple visual demonstration: An animation overlaying CBS’s forged document text with a quickly-generated, default-settings Word document (I know I first saw it over at LGF).

Meanwhile, the irony of Rather invoking the image of screaming bullies in his defense is as rich as the breakfast taco I’m about to eat…

Rather would rather go down in shame, rather than live his life out in a rather obsure way, rather or not he agrees. Rather agree with the truth, he would rather embrace a lie, rather than be known as rather incompetent. It is Rather ironic, that he would rather end his rather dubious illustrious career, this way. Wouldn’t he just rather go away rather quietly?

Yeah, I looked at the Mary Mapes thing yesterday, and read the first page of comments. I do find it disturbing how deluded some of those people are.

The ones that stood out are the one that called George W. Bush a, “coward of privilege,” and the ones calling for Bush to, “testify,” as if he’s somehow obligated to respond to false charges that are based on false evidence.

Dan must be deluded if he thinks that rehashing this will help his sorry reputation. Sorry, Dan, this is going to remain, in my memory, the most blatantly partisan attempt by a news organization to sway a presidential election.

3 cheers for “fake but accurate!”
I read Strategery last year, which went into detail about the behind the scenes action in this debacle. The thing that bothered me the most was the that the last thing Rather and Mapes said to each other before going on the air was “F.E.A.,” short for f*** em all, and then the captain of the self-absorbed doofus club had the nerve to end the broacast with, “Courage,” as if it he meant something by it.

If CBS hadn’t been a bunch of pansies and fired him as he deserved rather than letting him “retire” on his own terms, I doubt we would be listening to him trying to spin this story today.

I followed the HuffPo link from Treacher’s site. I gotta tell you, the absolute mind-numbing stupidity on display left me in shock. These people get to vote? Heck I’m surprised that they can get dressed every morning.

Why hasn’t someone in the federal government launched an investigation as to who forged those documents? I think it is a federal crime to fake government documents and pass them off as genuine. Isn’t it kinda’ like counterfeit money?

Would anybody be surprised to find that Danny boy himself faked them? I surely wouldn’t.

I think he totally lost it years ago. Shouldn’t he be taken off the streets and be committed before going postal against the empty suits at CBS?